On the contrary, he is more Italian than English, and he is more quick to see and sympathise with the national characteristics of Spain or France or Germany, than he is with those of England.

No insular feeling prevented him from being just to foreigners, or from having a keen pleasure in writing about them.

_Strafford_ is the only play he wrote on an English subject, and it is rather a study of a character which might find its place in any aristocracy than of an English character.

Even Pym and Hampden fail to be truly English, and it would have been difficult for any one but Browning to take their eminent English elements out of them.

_Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_ belong to Germany and Italy, and there are scarcely three poems in the whole of the seven numbers of the _Bells and Pomegranates_ which even refer to England.